Machines and Games

 

        My recent reflections about "saintly institutions" got me recalling some old ideas from my sociology teaching days.

        The intro soc textbooks typically said that there were three or four lines of theory in sociology: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory (Marxism), and rational choice theory. I thought that the last two could be considered sub-forms of the first two, which is not something that I want to go into here. I want to focus on the first two.

        Functionalist theory uses a living organism as the metaphor for how societies should function. Living organisms have structures like skeletons and circulatory systems, and each structure has a function. For example, the skeleton helps the organism  hold together, and the circulatory system nourishes the cells in the organism.

        An organism is just a highly developed machine. It is deterministic. When it is stimulated in a certain way, it responds in a certain way. If something from outside disrupts one of its functions, it corrects the disruption (homeostasis).

        The organic metaphor sees society as a set of structures (rules and laws). Each rule has a function. If we design the rules well, the organism will function well. When things aren’t going well, we revise the law. Our law library shelves get longer and longer, and we need more and more lawyers to navigate what we have created. Even behaviors that are not covered in the law books can lead to lawsuits, which means more lawyers and more restrictions on what we can do.

        The second line of theory is labeled "symbolic interactionism." Its defining metaphor is the game. The people playing the game make the rules, and most players obey the rules. When a lot of them don't obey, the players change the rules or create handicaps. This theory says that there are no divinely-sanctioned rules for living--all moral rules are arrived at by group consensus. This goes against my Catholic tradition, but I point to areas where my Catholic tradition has had to change what it considered "natural." For centuries the church forbade "usury," taking interest on loans. Somewhere around the 1500s it abandoned that moral principle. Somewhat later it quit accepting slavery as a permissible moral practice. Recently a top church authority (Pope St. John Paul II) said that capital punishment is immoral, a judgment echoed by most church authorities these days, in spite of widespread U.S. Catholic belief that it is still permissible.

        In other words, the Catholic community has changed its rules.

        An institution such as "the economy" is a set of games. When I said that no institution is saintly, I was saying that no institution operates like a machine. We cannot design an economy so that it will always operate with justice. When we try to do that, we can change the rules, and in the back of our mind we can hope that one more tinkering with the rules will make the machine automatically produce justice. But it won't. We are in a game, and there will always be some people who will break the rules. We can punish the rule-breakers (sinners), or we can hold back on the punishment (forgiveness) and consider modifying the rules to make the playing field more fair.

        In practice, both theories appear similar, but they differ in how we make moral judgments on their basis. If we believe that there are divinely authorized rules (natural law), then we see rule-breakers as worthy of punishment, and if punishment does not work, worthy of exclusion from society. ("Lock 'em up and throw away the key.") We tell ourselves that our punishment (prison) is remedial--we want prisoners to be rehabilitated so they can return to society as fully-functioning participants, but in most places we cannot find the resources needed to practice rehabilitation alongside punishment. Prisons in most places are designed for punishment, period. If there is rehabilitation, somebody is going beyond what the "correctional" institution is capable of. Such people are to be applauded, but the correction system cannot do more than punish.

        If we see our institutions as games, we are more open to modifying the rules without excluding rule-breakers from future play. We punish rule-breakers, but always with the assumption that the rulebreakers are just like us, and forgiving their violation may be better than punishing them. They may even be prophets calling us to make the game more fair. They are part of "us," not a cancer on the body politic.

        Our economic rules do need serious modifying. Most of us admit that the middle class has been shrinking, and that it is getting harder and harder to find decent housing, and affordable food and transportation. This is why we elected Donald Trump.

        Mr. Trump's backers are not likely to be open to changing any rules that will make the game more fair for people below them on the economic scale. They will say that the economy is a machine, and is working just fine. Rising tides lift all boats. Except that they don't. They will resist the idea that the game is set up so that more and more people cannot win. If they do not adjust the rules, the players will take their marbles and go home. They will abandon the game. They could vote Mr. Trump and his allies out in the next election, or they might decide that democracy will never work and turn to violent ways to get what they think is fairness. 

        In fairness to Mr. Trump, the Democrats have been no more likely to welcome changing the rules than backers of Mr. Trump. Voters have recognized this, and have punished the Democrats.

        To recap: our institutions are not saintly; people keep breaking the rules. There is no perfect structure that will prevent that. We should look at our institutions as games that require fair rules if we want people to keep playing them. Rule-breakers are not all evil, worthy of hell-fire. They are people like us, who want to play in our games. We should welcome them and listen to them. There will always be some people who will push the limits and break the rules, but when we decide that there are too many such people, we will change the rules of the game.

 

 

 

 

 

Saintly institutions

 

       Well, it's happened. Donald Trump is president.  There are no more saintly institutions.

        I grew up in saintly institutions. St. James Parish in Decatur, with its pastor, its church, its school. The city of Decatur, with its parks. The country, the USA, truly a blessed place. Victorious over Naziism and Japanese militarism.

        The Franciscan Order, with its seminary system, and their saintly faculties. And over all, the Catholic Church, with its pope and bishops.

        Added to those saintly institutions, some secular saints: science and technology.

        As a novice Franciscan in 1955 I was commissioned to write the script for a pageant celebrating the 60th ordination anniversary for a priest in our friary. My script celebrated the sanctity of everything in the Franciscan and Catholic world. I incorporated whatever music I could find that illustrated saintly triumph. A few years later I was commissioned to write another script celebrating something--it may have been the 50th anniversary of the founding of the seminary where we were studying. My script was even more triumphalist. I recall featuring a covered wagon and a campfire, with patriotic music. I involved every student in the seminary in its production--even the production had to be saintly. The friars in the Midwest were truly saints combining Franciscan virtue with American virtue.

        In grad school I received a secular vision of saintly institutions: functionalist sociology. The goal was to design perfect institutions that would run by themselves, freeing everyone in the society to pursue happiness. A society was to be like the human body, self-correcting when any outside force threatened one of its functions. Perfect laws would ensure a perfect (saintly) society.

        The nail in the coffin of Catholic saintliness was the revelation of sex abuse by clergy and religious. My experience of living fifty years in a religious community gave me more evidence that not all of us are saintly. More and more revelation brought down the image of saintliness of our American institutions: slavery, treatment of indigenous people in our land, present-day systematic injustice. All the things that Trump politicians label as "woke."

        Our culture says we should tamp down such revelations. Reinstate the vision of saintliness in America. We have no sinners.

 

 "There is no institution that human beings cannot mess up."

        I have promoted that statement for years. It was a statement of my experience. But I did not carry the statement to its logical conclusion: it means that no institution is saintly. There are sinners everywhere. We are the sinners. We will never design the perfect institution. We will never get all the laws needed to wipe out crime. We are not likely to be more virtuous than our ancestors.

        This is an old religious insight. It has not been a popular insight in our society with its image of itself as a saintly society. We keep thinking that one more law or ordinance will fix us. Our vision is too utopian.

  

Our Future under Donald Trump

        Mr. Trump and his allies are likely to mess up many of our institutions, and mess them up badly. In his last administration he allowed the Centers for Disease Control to be led by incompetent people, and when Covid hit, the CDC was not as prepared to deal with it as it would have been had it been better led. We can anticipate a flood of incompetent judges, decimation of efforts to mitigate climate change, legitimized persecution of those among us who are "not like us," (gays and transgender people), resurrection of Jim Crow-like behavior norms. We may see our military used against us. Fox news, talk radio, and social media could become our only sources of information about what is happening in our country and around the world. Foolish economic decisions could lead us into another depression.

        But let's be honest. Democratic administrations have not touched some of the root causes of our problems. The goal of wind and solar farms is to allow us to keep on doing what we have always done. No president since Jimmy Carter has dared to suggest publicly that we might need to do things we don't like to do. We may have to sacrifice something. Carter suggested sacrifice and was branded as a fool. We are living by a divinely sanctioned moral principle: "If I like to do something, you are not allowed to stop me from doing it." The effect of this principle is the legitimizing of monumental inequality. Our systems have risen up and swallowed us.

  

Repent!

      The figure of a hooded figure holding up a sign that says "Repent" is a comic staple. To repent means to stop doing something you are now doing. It means to admit that you are not saintly, and to follow up with that admission and do something to change your behavior.

        There will be saints and sinners in the Trump administration, just as there have been saints and sinners in the Biden administration, and in every bank and investment house and school and church in the country. The popular vote favoring Trump is a plea for someone to do something different. Not all supporters of Trump are sinners.

        Other countries have elected unwise leaders and survived--think of Argentina and Brazil. We will muddle through.

        We will muddle through and abandon the vision of the saintly institution. We will try to distinguish saints from sinners in whatever institution we live in. We will praise the saints and call the sinners, gently, to repentance. Punishment is not the way to create a saintly institution. We will acknowledge that we are all partly saint and partly sinner, and that it is hard to tell the difference this side of eternity. So we will treat our fellow saintly sinners the way we would like to be treated ourselves.

        This is the way Christianity says we should live. If we live that way we might be able to call ourselves a Christian society.

        But we should quit calling ourselves that. There are people among us who are not Christian and who feel excluded when we say things like that. We should call ourselves sinful/saintly followers of Jesus Christ, trying to live peacefully with people who see God differently from how we see God. We do not own God. We do not control God. We do not have a monopoly on knowledge of God, and still less on living the way God wants us to live.

        We are all learners. Jesus said "make disciples of all nations." A disciple is a learner. To learn means to change your mind.

        To learn means to repent.

  

On abortion as an issue of natural law

[I wrote this in 2007. It still seems relevant.]

      "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

      Thomas Jefferson began his argument for independence with these words.

      Traditional Catholic theology held certain truths to be self-evident, and other truths to be true but not self-evident. The former were based on natural law, while the latter were known only by the light of revelation. For example, it was self-evident, a truth of natural law, that murder is wrong, but not self-evident that one had to be baptized in order to be saved. Natural law was known by all people of good will. Truths known by revelation were known only by people who had been exposed to revelation as taught by the Church.

      This distinction was central to the argument used by John Kennedy in his speech to Protestant ministers in 1960, the speech in which he defended himself against the claim that if he were elected president, he would have to enforce moral precepts held as true by the Church. He argued that a Catholic politician in this country was not bound to enforce moral truths that were known only by the light of revelation. Catholic politicians must enforce self-evident moral truths, but are under no greater obligation to do that than any other person of good will. Issues of natural law have to be decided by following the rules of political debate and decision.

      This argument broke with the traditional European understanding that political leaders had the right and the duty to enforce what they believed to be true, even when those truths were not held by people of other faiths. The maxim was "error has no rights." The argument had proceeded from the time of the Thirty Years War, in which Catholics and Protestants used violence to enforce their beliefs, through the principle cuius regio, eius religio, which could be translated as "whatever religion the king espouses, the people should also espouse." That was a principle that at least reduced violence. In John Courtney Murray's phrase, it was an "article of peace."

      The historical story could be told that the American colonies, through their experience of flight from religious persecution in Europe and of living in relative peace with people of competing faiths, had discovered a strategy that greatly increased the prospects of peaceful coexistence. Catholics could understand the strategy in terms of natural law versus revelation, and this is the distinction that freed John Kennedy and opened the way for his election.

      The distinction between natural law and revelation is central to the stance being taken by Catholic bishops on the issue of abortion. We are not, they say, trying to enforce our denominational beliefs on the rest of society. Everyone should know that abortion is murder, and that murder is self-evidently wrong. We have every right to attempt to punish the behavior by means of civil institutions.

      It is hard for those of us accustomed to a post-Kennedy tradition to appreciate how the discussion has imperceptibly slipped back into a pre-1960 mentality. We have slipped into the pre-1960 mentality by placing the Church in official opposition to a political order. The Church has become a player in the political game, not just in the sense that its members have personal beliefs that they attempt to realize, but in the sense of overt, structural attempts to control. Bishops are denying Communion to politicians.

      What we Catholics too often fail to realize is that many people are opposed to making abortion illegal because of their own sincere religious beliefs. We have become too convinced by the anti-abortion argument that anyone favoring the legality of abortion must be motivated by financial incentives. I have become convinced by conversation with pro-choice people that their statement that they are pro-choice, not pro-abortion, is sincere. They believe that abortion in the early stages of pregnancy is not murder. (Recall that, in spite of what we have been told by Church leaders in recent years, for centuries official Catholic Church teaching held the same position. The term used was "ensoulment," which meant that there was a point in time, sometimes months after conception, when the fetus became "ensouled," possessed of an immortal soul.) Beyond that moral evaluation of abortion itself, there are additional reasons why one could be pro-choice. As Robert Drinan once argued, it is not always wise to attempt to enforce a moral principle by legal means. It can be argued that a law against abortion is unenforceable, because it involves behavior that is hidden--in fact, more hidden than almost any other behavior that is not now criminalized. Few people would want to see a woman imprisoned because she had procured an abortion, yet that is what making abortion illegal would do. One can only imagine the kinds of symbolic protests that would follow, similar to the protests in the 1960's that caused legislatures to overturn laws that made contraception illegal. Making abortion illegal would result in women using illegal means to procure the abortion, means which are by nature uncontrolled by open medical practice and which often result in injury or death to the woman as well as to the fetus.

      The bottom line of my argument therefore is that, in light of widespread public disagreement with the belief that abortion is murder, and that it is not wise to attempt to prevent it by law, our position is not based on natural law but on revelation. The belief is not self-evident to all people of good will, but it is a denominational belief, something not to be enforced on those of other faiths.

      By framing the argument in terms of natural law, we have allowed the Church to be dragged back into the same position that it traditionally had in Europe, where Church leaders defended their right to tell the State what it should do. The result has been the same here as it was in Europe: a divisiveness that poisons political discourse, causing people to accuse their opponents of bad faith, people to be dealt with not by political discussion, but only by means of naked political power.

      The smell and taste of power is seductive. Fundamentalist Protestants may be excused when they taste it for the first time, after a tradition of rejection of politics. We Catholics should have learned from our experience. Things go better when we refrain from trying to run the state. Abortion should be dealt with as a matter of faith, not as a matter of self-evident truth. We should concentrate on persuading our own people of the values that we believe are at stake. We are under no obligation to make everyone else come along.

Where to go in Ukraine

        The war in Ukraine is reaching a crisis point. It is becoming accepted that without substantial outside help, Ukraine cannot withstand the forces of its much larger neighbor. Now that neighbor is enlisting troops from North Korea. If Ukraine begins to accept troops from other countries in large enough numbers to make a difference, we are on the verge of another world war.

 

        It is time for Ukraine to admit that it cannot continue to resist militarily. Now is the time for Ukraine to move to a nonviolent strategy of opposing occupation. Ukraine is where Denmark was when, at the beginning of World War II, it accepted the fact that it could not withstand German power and adopted a nonviolent resistance strategy.

 

        Nonviolence can only be effective if it has the support of the vast majority of a population. Ukraine is in that situation. Its people are weary of having their infrastructure systematically destroyed and their manpower systematically killed off. Yet they do not want themselves to be defined as subjects of a legally accepted occupying power.

 

        The Ukrainian government should announce that it is ceasing violent resistance to occupation, and that it opposes Russian occupation as legally and morally unacceptable. It should at the same time announce that it welcomes soldiers in the occupying power to become citizens of Ukraine, ceasing their violent attack. Both Russian and North Korean soldiers, who are now cannon fodder, might welcome the invitation to join a state that recognizes freedom and equal citizenship. Former soldiers will be welcomed into Ukrainian society, offering the world an example of how a multicultural society can grow from an armed conflict.

 

        Ukraine has the high moral ground. All the nations now supporting it will welcome a strategy that relieves them from the danger of armed conflict with Russia. Russia will be forced into an even lower moral ground than where it already stands, except that it will now be isolated even more.

 

        The more troops Mr.Putin pours into Ukraine, the more new citizens Ukraine will gain and Russia lose. 

 

        If there was ever a situation where nonviolence seems a promising strategy, it is today in the Ukraine conflict with Russia.

 

 

 

 

 

Seeds

[Homily preparation two times a week has been where I try to be creative these days. Working on the Greek-Latin psalter on “friarzimm.com” is a non-creative job that is taking a lot of my time. The software, Wix, has not allowed me to move my Word files onto the site without a lot of manual reformatting. But here’s a recent homily, for Friday of the Sixteenth Week of the liturgical year, with the gospel parable about seeds falling in different places.]

 

Today’s gospel interprets the story of the seeds in a different way from the one I used last Wednesday. On Wednesday I said the parable is about how even a little effort on our part can result in a great harvest. Today’s gospel says the parable is about why sometimes the gospel does not take root when we try to share it.

I am going to do a statistical analysis of the parable. I want to estimate the percentage of people in the city of Quincy who fit each of the four categories in the parable. 

There are four categories: seed sown on the road, seed sown on rocky ground, seed sown among thorns, and seed sown on good ground. I will use the 40,000 people in the city of Quincy as an example of how we could think about the parable.

First of all, the parable assumes that the seed has been sown somewhere. How many of the people in Quincy have never heard the gospel? Of the 40,000, how many would you estimate have not even been exposed to the gospel in any formal way?

Most of us have heard snatches of the gospel just because references to scripture are so much a part of our cultural heritage. But some people have been influenced deeply by the gospel without being a church member.

An example: Abraham Lincoln. It seems that he almost never attended a church. But he makes reference to passages from scripture in a way that makes people think he must have had some kind of systematic exposure to it. For example, one of his most famous speeches uses the image a “house divided against itself,” which is an obvious reference to the gospel. How many people in Quincy would not even have that much acquaintance with scripture or the gospels?

My guess would be 40%, or 16,000. Much of our younger generation is growing up without religious instruction. (You can disagree with that number. I hope you do, because that means you are getting into what I am trying to do.)

So 60% of Quincyans, 24,000, would have the seed scattered among them. How many of them would be the road, where birds come and eat the seed up? My guess would be 50% of the people who have heard of the gospel. 50% of the 24,000 people who have heard of the gospel never get beyond just hearing of it. That’s 12,000 people, leaving another 12,000 for the other categories.

How many are planted on rocky ground? Let’s say 2,000. Another 2,000 would be among thorns. That leaves 8,000 people who are fertile soil where the seed can grow up to produce fruit.

I could go on and estimate how many of the 8,000 would produce 30-fold, how many 60-fold, and how many 100-fold, but I won’t do that, because that was not what Jesus intended when he spoke the parable.

Obviously Jesus didn’t care how many people were involved at any stage of the preaching of the gospel. His point was that there are conditions which make it impossible for the seed to sprout even when it has been sown, and that when it is sown on good ground, some of it produces enough that we can almost ignore the rest. Jesus didn’t care about anything more than that.

Which brings us back to the idea that his basic message was: God’s grace gets sown in all kinds of environments, and with various kinds of response, but in the end some of it produces far beyond what you would expect.

So, of the 40,000 people in Quincy, maybe 8,000 are hearing God’s word, and of those 8,000, some produce more fruit than others. But that is enough for marvelous things to happen.

And marvelous things have happened.

People bemoan how secular our society and culture have become. But our society and culture have been influenced by many of the things Jesus did.

Jesus’s public life was taken up with two things: healing and teaching. Look how much of the city of Quincy is involved in healing. The hospital and medical group are, I think, the largest employers in town. How many young people graduate from college with degrees designed to promote healing?

I am helping with the tenant workshops going on right now. One of the people attending the workshop  told the group that she was a recovering alcohol and drug addict, but her immediate goal was to take part in the St. Jude Hospital for Children run from Quincy to Peoria that took place last weekend.

Jesus taught. How much of our work force and our tax dollars are going to the public schools and John Wood Community College? How much are Catholics spending, in addition to their taxes, to support four elementary schools, one high school, and Quincy University? And more and more our schools, but public and private, are involved in healing, because so many of our young people need more healing than young people used to need.

Even in how we deal with crime, the goal of teaching lies behind our efforts. Our prisons are part of what is called the Department of Corrections, the DOC. Correction implies teaching. Rehabilitation has always been a goal of our correction systems, even when correction gets swallowed up by the politics of vengeance.

The seed has produced much fruit. But the seed needs to be sown over and over again in each generation. I think Jesus intended his parable not only to make us think about the power of God’s grace, but about the need for sowers. Jesus explicitly said that we should ask the master of the harvest to send workers into the harvest because the harvest is great but the laborers are few.

There are not many young men and women entering religious life and the priesthood. But the harvest is still great and the laborers are still few. We should pray that the master of the harvest will send workers into future harvests, maybe in ways that we do not now imagine. Nobody imagined that the harvest could be gathered the way St. Francis of Assisi gathered it until he came along and demonstrated a new way to do it. Since the time of Francis there have been men and women who gathered the harvest in all kinds of new ways. I am sure that history will not stop with those movements. God’s grace has a way of sprouting in unexpected places, the way weeds sprout in sidewalks.

 

Hitch-hiking--sort of

A while back I joined a small group of Quincy University friends that call themselves “the writers’ circle.” They write poetry.  

 

Poetry is not my favorite way of expressing myself, but I try.

 

I’ve been occupied for the past few weeks trying to get a version of the Catholic “Liturgy of the Hours” up and running on a separate website (friarzimm.com). So, just to keep this site moving, I am sharing a poem I wrote for the writers’ circle a couple of years ago.

 

 

Hitch-hiking—sort of

 

Ancient phrase: hitch a ride.

 

Never did it in my life. Yet . . .

          hang on,

          get pulled along,

          piggy-back,

          how I pray.

 

What is God? Where is God? Who is God?

          All question marks.

What to do?

I hitch rides.

 

Words in the driver’s seat.

Words of psalms,

          words more than 2000 years old.

 

Once, 1958, old retreat-master:

          “Love the psalms.”

          Words stuck.

 

Grad school, 1968. Didn’t know if there is a God.

          In case of emergency . . . use psalms,

                   say the words,

                   read the words,

          maybe there’s a God somewhere listening.

 

Today, 2022. Same problem.

          Same solution.

          Use the words.

 

Tradition packages the psalms;

          people read, say, sing

                   same words

                   at same time

                   on same weekday.

 

Time zones? Trust that the Lord adjusts.

          How many men,

          how many women

                   are singing, saying, reading, these words

                             right now

                             along with me?

 

I am not alone.

 

Latin.

          Latin joins me to multitudes across time,

                   beyond space.

          How many people prayed in Latin

                   across centuries?

                             Augustine, Gregory, Francis,

                             Clare (did she know Latin?)

                             Decatur hospital sisters, 6:00 am.

                                      Were they chanting Latin?

                             Then me.

 

Greek.

          Same words, different sounds.

                   70 men in Alexandria,

                   Luke, Basil, Chrysostom,

                   the Orthodox world,

                   Today, me.

 

I am not alone.

 

I hitch rides,

          get carried along.

          Best I can do.

 

Keeps the heart warm.

 

 

 

 

That remarkable amendment

 

[published in Muddy River News, May 13, 2024]

    Here is how part of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

    Protestant friends once told me that their minister told them that Catholic priests were so close to the devil that they had tails. Fortunately, by the time they told me that, they were no longer checking me out for a tail, if they ever were tempted to do that.

    But people did believe things like that. Years ago they might have been tempted to do something about it. They would have acted on their belief that evil should not be allowed to exist.

    Here is a translation of the First Amendment: Even though you think your neighbor is seriously wrong, keep your beliefs to yourself and behave with courtesy.

    Our country seems to be in danger of too many people forgetting the lesson that prompted the First Amendment: religious wars that went on for decades and centuries.  We are divided over two issues: is abortion an evil that our government should prevent? Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?

    These beliefs are held so strongly that we could call them religious beliefs. But our country has a tradition of dealing with conflicting religious beliefs without violence.

    Violence is a tool of control. We are not called to control people who have religious ideas different from ours. We are called to treat them with respect. Maybe, like with the people who believed priests had tails, things will calm down enough that we can lock up the guns for good. We have learned that such an outcome is possible, and has happened many, many times in our history. Let us hope that it happens again in our time.

 Brother Joe Zimmerman